Right. I recorded a song, mixed it (sort of) and burned it to a CD. It doesn't have the volume of a commercial CD or the effects, but it's just as clean. I did it. Now I just have to learn how to do it better.
LOL - drstawl, no, I don't think I normalized the .wav file, because I don't even recognize what you're talking about. What would that procedure have accomplished, then?
Congrats on your first CD. Does sound like you need to learn abbout normalizing your recordings. If you will go to the main page here you will find the help that you need. Read, read, read, man. Then apply what you read and you will get it.
Right. I got the Cool Edit upgrade with all the effects, and normalized the aforementioned tracks. It was nice watching the waveform get bigger and fatter. Better, but still not loud enough. So, I think the problem is that the signal I'm recording isn't hot enough. Make sense? Also, second question: if it clips, then there's no good way to repair that in the mix, right?
By normalization, are we talking about maximizing (i.e. just increasing the gain to use the whole range) or compression (lowering the gain of the louder parts so that everything can be made louder)?
Normalization just interpolates the wave out to the maximum headroom available based on the loudest transient in the entire file.
If you edit out any transients that aren't really necessary (through gentle volume reductions; listen to the passage and see if there really should be an amplitude spike at that point in the recording) the results of the normalization will be much more dramatic, because the softer parts will get more boost.